Every now and then I like to imagine a day on which everyone will have finally understood the contribution of the Community Reinvestment Act to the mortgage crisis.

On that day people will understand it is totally irrelevant that most subprime lending was done by independent mortgage companies not directly subject to the CRA . They will not make the incredibly untrue claim the CRA was a 1970s era law that could not have caused a crisis decades later. They won't say that the CRA did not require toxic loans .

Today is not that day.

Over at syndication service AlterNet , senior writer Joshua Holland has become the latest business writer to put forth the crackpot idea the CRA had nothing to do with the mortgage bubble.

The reality is that no bank has ever been “forced to comply with government mandates about mortgage lending” — it's a bald-faced lie.